Civil and criminal caseloads for courts in the United States are large and rapidly increasing. In Los Angeles alone, it is estimated that over two thousand criminal defendants are arraigned each day. The cost of transporting criminal defendants, under guard, between detention facilities and courtrooms is enormous. The process of transporting prisoners, often in shackles, is not only demeaning to the prisoners and expensive, but it is time consuming and presents the risk of prisoner escape and violence directed at court officials and the public.
Another serious and longstanding problem with current court procedure is the need for great numbers of witnesses to travel to courtrooms to attend criminal and civil court proceedings. This represents a tremendous inconvenience and an enormous collective financial burden to the witnesses themselves, and to their employers and families. Furthermore, the witnesses are often victims of rape, child abuse, or other crimes, and must undergo a traumatic courtroom experience when testifying in person in criminal proceedings.
Yet another major, longstanding problem with present day court procedure is that huge volumes of court proceedings must be transcribed by human court reporters. This not only represents an enormous cost, but results in numerous transcription errors.
It would be desirable to eliminate these serious, longstanding procedural problems by allowing witnesses and criminal defendants to participate interactively in court proceedings (by video and audio signals) from locations remote from the courtroom, and by generating permanent, combined video and audio records of court proceedings. However, it has not been known until the present invention how this may be accomplished in a convenient manner, and without prejudicing criminal defendants or diminishing the value of witness testimony.
It would also be desirable to facilitate audiovisual interaction between individuals at local and remote stations (including, but not limited to courtrooms) without distraction by obtrusive video cameras, and in a manner permitting simultaneous observation of the passive as well as the active participants in the interactive process. However, it has not been known until the present invention how this may be accomplished.
Video conferencing systems have been developed, as described for example in U.S. Pat. No. 4,054,908, issued Oct. 18, 1977 to Poirier, et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 4,400,724, issued Aug. 23, 1983 to Fields; U.S. Pat. No. 3,725,587, issued Apr. 3, 1973 to Klein; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,775,563, issued Nov. 27, 1973 to Klein. However, these systems have a number of limitations which diminish their usefulness in general, and their suitability for courtroom purposes in particular.
The video conferencing system of U.S. Pat. No. 4,054,908 includes a video image display unit for each conferee and a video camera for each conferee or group of conferees. However, although many conferees may participate in a conference, each display unit displays only one conferee image at a time. Such image represents the individual conferee speaking in the loudest voice at a given instant, or a group of conferees in the field of view of a single video camera whom are collectively speaking in the loudest voice at a given instant. This limits the visual information available to each conferee. For example, a conferee delivering a statement to one or more of the others cannot view the reactions of each recipient while the statement is being delivered.
The video conferencing system of U.S. Pat. No. 4,400,724 includes N conferee stations, with at least (N-1) video cameras and at least (N-1) video image display units at each conferee station. This system is undesirably complicated and expensive since it requires three or more video cameras at each station for conferences including four or more participants. Further, all conferee stations in this system are identical (there is no provision for a hierarchy of stations having different control capabilities), and the video cameras at each station are separated from the image display units, so that no conferee could simultaneously maintain eye contact with both a camera and an image displayed on an image display unit.
The systems of U.S. Pats. No. 3,725,587 and 3,775,563 include a video camera and a video receiver at each of N conferee stations, and a means for displaying the output of each of these video cameras on a different one of N monitors. An additional ("N +1"th) video camera is then focussed on the set of N monitors to generate a single combined video image which may be transmitted to the conferee stations for display on a single video receiver at each station. U.S. Pat. No. 3,775,563 suggests, at column 3, that the combined video image may include a special location (for example, in the center of the receiver screen) for each conferee assigned as a "privileged" conferee. However, the video camera at each station is separated from the video receiver at such station so that no conferee could simultaneously maintain eye contact with both the camera and an image displayed on the screen.
The present invention overcomes these and other limitations of conventional video conferencing systems, and in a preferred embodiment, includes features specially designed for courtroom applications.